


100 miles through the desert repenting

by drowninglovers



Series: the soft animal of your body [2]
Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Sharing a Bed, The Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known, veering dangerously close to rpf real john irving if there's wifi in heaven i'm sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-18
Updated: 2019-10-18
Packaged: 2020-12-07 19:48:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20981399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drowninglovers/pseuds/drowninglovers
Summary: John Irving’s heart has been weighed and found wanting.





	100 miles through the desert repenting

**Author's Note:**

> title (of course) from _ wild geese _ by mary oliver

How long has he been waiting for this? For Tom Hartnell's arms wrapped around his neck, his fingers tangled in John's neat hair and John's hand against the points of Hartnell's hips, just a thin layer of his shirt separating skin from skin and Hartnell's warm mouth against his and John's back pressed into the side of the bunk - against the bed but not yet atop it, approaching the point of no return but not quite at it. John gasps into his mouth and swallows the name 'Tom' against his tongue and it tastes like benediction. They pull back for a moment, looking at each other, foreheads pressed together. From this angle, John can see the sliver of pale, freckled skin on his collarbone where the button came off his shirt. After he left in a hurry, John scoured his cabin for that button until he found it wedged in between the floorboards. The indent it left against his palm stayed for hours where he gripped it imagining the skin it helped to cover. When he woke he half expected its shape to be carved into his hand like stigmata. He almost wishes it had been.

John memorizes the knobs of Tom's spine like a set of prayer beads and finally exhales. 

⚓ ⚓⚓

He's 15 the first time he meets Malcolm. Almost immediately he realizes that something’s changed. Some minuscule detail has tilted his world onto a new axis and he has no idea how to adjust, he just knows that everything is different now. This friendship is not like others he’s had, there’s no way it can compare to others. All he knows is that he wants to be around Malcolm all the time but can barely stand it. Any room they enter together becomes immediately devoid of oxygen. When Malcolm touches him, no matter how lightly, that skin burns. 

Making friends has never been something that comes easy to him. His father always reprimanded him for this, asking him why he couldn’t be more personable, why he always has trouble making deep connections. There’s never been any explanation for why he’s this way, why he holds his breath and waits to see if his friends are going to leave. Well, at least until now. It takes a year after meeting Malcolm before John draws the connection between his passivity towards girls and the way that being with Malcolm makes him feel like he's being remade bit by bit. John Irving’s heart has been weighed and found wanting.

It’s not as though he isn’t _interested _ in girls, per se. On the contrary, he finds them to be very interesting. But he can’t picture himself ever settling down with one. In some vague, abstract way, he can imagine being married if he doesn’t think too long about it. His bride is a half-finished portrait without a name or face, invented to keep his worry at bay. He can picture himself being married because he assumes he will be at some point, but he can’t picture it being a happy marriage.

Girls are pretty and nice to be around, he likes looking at them, but it’s the same way he looks at art. He admires them but knows not to touch. Even before he meets Malcolm he knows there is something incorrect about this behaviour, knows that he should feel something when a girl cuts her eyes toward him in the middle of service, presses his hand at a spring dance. When his school friends tell stories of girls back home, he should have some reaction beyond a nod and a closed-mouth smile that’s closer to a grimace. It would have been so much easier had he _ just _ been a late bloomer like his father thought. 

John doesn't want to _ be _ a husband unless he also gets to _have _ a husband. 

Instead of a girl, it’s Malcolm who makes him feel like his chest is newly-lit with fireflies, who makes him smile and laugh. It’s Malcolm whom he carries on his back by Bighi Bay and Malcolm who he misses like a limb whenever they’re apart. 

John calls him ‘Elphie’ and each time the nickname falls from his lips he knows he’s trying to say something else. But the truth is too big for him to wrap his teeth around, too complicated to wield as anything other than a weapon against himself. Malcolm isn’t like him, and that’s okay. It’s enough that he’s here, that he loves John in his own way.

⚓⚓⚓

The Bible study continues, even though everything else has changed. They need it to keep up appearances. Nobody can suspect them of profanity with the guise of religion in place. Although, now they talk about quite the variety of things not entirely limited to theology and sometimes they do little talking and much else. 

“You haven’t done this before,” Tom whispers before they make love for the first time, dancing his fingers over John’s breastbone and the dangerous _ thud-thud-thud _ of his heart below. It isn’t a question. Tom knows he’s never done this before, in any capacity; every man on the expedition could probably guess just by looking at him for a little too long. Before Tom, he’d hardly even been kissed (three times to be precise, each of them horrible in their own unique ways but least of all because none of them were with someone he wanted to kiss). 

“No.” He knows the mechanics. Roughly. He thinks he knows some of the mechanics. It’s not as though he’s ever had someone he could ask about this. What's more, he never thought he’d actually do this. Being half in love with another man is one thing, wanting to kiss him toes the line between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, what they're about to do...well, that’s a whole other beast in itself. It could get them damned or, more immediately, flogged, but John finds that he is not overly concerned with the consequences at the moment. For once. 

“But you want to?”

“Yes.” He wants to say ‘more than anything’ but that feels a little over the top. “You’ve done this before?” 

“Yes. Once,” Tom answers and covers John’s mouth with his own. 

Funny, he’d always thought that transgression of this sort would feel like a fall from grace. No, it’s more like flying. It’s like being weightless and wholly alive. _ Alive_. What a beautiful word.

-

Tom dozes, in a rather uncomfortable position, on his half of the pillow. He tends to stay in the cabin after Bible study, or whatever else; if one of them has watch he’ll sneak down from the hammocks in the middle of the night. By now he knows which floorboards to avoid, where light pools so he can creep around it, how to open the door to John’s cabin so that it slides silently along the track. It would be rather close to thievery, had his victim not been entirely willing. He never stays too long, never runs the risk of being caught on his way back. He’s smart that way.

There’s a slash of light from the lamp he forgot to extinguish. Knife-sharp against the darkness as it falls over the peak of Tom’s lean shoulder, the valley of his neck. A stream of freckles traces over the muscles of his back, along his hips, twining around the curves of his calves. Every time John thinks he’s found all of them, a new patch seems to pop up overnight. Almost daring him to map them, as though Tom’s body is begging to be touched. His hair probably goes golden in the summer. It’s darker now, but John can imagine him during an English summer—sitting dockside with the cuffs of his trousers rolled, an extra button on his shirt undone, hair sun-bleached and rumpled with an easy smile on his face—John wants to see him in summer when they needn't worry about leads or pack ice.

He’s so beautiful. John never thought men could be beautiful like this. Beauty was a thing reserved for women and art, for the truly sublime - that is to say God and His creations. But isn't Tom as much His handiwork as, say, the Aurora? Doesn't he deserve to be called beautiful? To say he isn't would be a lie, and which is worse: acknowledging another man's beauty or telling such a bald-faced lie? 

Beautiful things deserve to be displayed and admired. They should be viewed in sunlight. John wishes he could see Tom the way he is now—sleep-softened and peaceful—in daylight. He wishes they didn't have to be relegated to being creatures of the shadows. There are so many ways he wants to see Tom, wants to kiss him and love him. Under the blinding Arctic midday sun, brighter than anything they get back home, painted colours that only exist at certain latitudes by the Aurora - greens and blues so vivid he thought he was dreaming the first time he saw the sky cracked open with colour bleeding out, dappled pink and orange by the golden hour, bronzed like a classic hero. 

_ Chiaroscuro,_ that’s the technical term for it, the interplay of darkness and light. John knows this well enough, art was never going to be something he could make a career out of but he enjoys it nonetheless. For years he thought that if he tried his hardest to redirect his affections to Christian graces and artistic pleasures it would make this _ thing _ inside of him go away. That’s why he was careful with his subjects: always inanimate objects, ships and ports, still lifes and landscapes. A little bit of good to balance out the bad. Beautiful things are born out of darkness.

⚓⚓⚓

'Lies with'. 

That's the exact wording used in Leviticus chapters 18, 20, and 23. Any man who lies with another man the way he would his wife is an abomination. That's what the good book says. John's read it enough times to know the phrasing by heart, flipping through the pages hoping that maybe they’d say something different this time, tell him that he is not dirty. 

It’s dark and the room is drafty and John wonders if what he and Malcolm are doing is a sin too. They aren’t even touching, and cannot yet be considered men, but they are lying together all the same. Is sharing a bed just as bad if some part of you wished you were doing more? Is a sinner made when he commits an act, or when he first conceives the thought? 

Malcolm snores lightly, one hand dangling over the edge of the bed and John memorizes the way the light traces the curve of his shoulder and aches. This is normal behaviour, isn't it? All boys share beds at some point, it's common for bachelors to be bedfellows to cut costs. So why does he feel like they’re doing something unspeakable? Both nights they started out back to back with ample space between their forms but last night the cold had driven them to turn inwards, and John awoke in the middle of the night to Malcolm's arm draped over his ribs, his ankle wedged between Malcolm's own. He was warmer than he could ever remember being and wanted to burrow deeper into the home of blankets they'd wrapped so tightly around themselves to keep the draft out. 

But he didn't. He pulled his ankle back and shifted Malcolm's hand off his ribcage. He waited 10 seconds to see if his bedmate would stir. When there was no sign of him waking, John rolled over and positioned his body on the precarious ridge at the edge of the bed. Much colder, but far safer. 

Tonight, he wakes up with Malcolm pressed against his back, light snoring raising the hair on the back of his neck, fingers loosely wrapped around his midsection. He hopes to God that this is some sort of crucible, if he holds out the rest of the week, he'll be free of this awful feeling that burrowed between his ribcage and hollowed out his heart. He is doing so good, for all his wanting he's never touched another boy in any way that would cause his elders to glance at him a second too long. In fact, he hardly touches anyone. If he does, it’s only ever after the other person touched him first. Safety comes with caution. But John wants Malcolm, not to possess, not in any way he knows how to articulate at that point, but he feels that so desperately it nearly makes his heart stop. He wants to make a home with Malcolm, to love him without worrying about the repercussions. To be loved, just once, but very deeply.

In his dreams, he rolls over in bed to waiting arms and Malcolm holds him tight to his chest, kissing his eyelids. In his dreams they are awake and asleep at once, fully lucid but not in the same world they went to sleep in, something softer. Dream-Malcolm knows what John wants to say without him having to say it all, speaks the same secret language of strategic touches, weighted looks, and references cloaked in half-truth that John could write a dictionary for. 

He thinks he might even love Malcolm, the way a married man is supposed to love his wife but few actually do. Pure love, the kind you’d break the world for or go to the ends of the earth to get back. It’s love that nearly kills him, not some carnal desire. He didn't know how men go about lying together but doesn’t require much more than actual closeness. He wants to be tucked close to Malcolm's body like a secret, to be kissed, to map the planes of his body with his hands the way his eyes roved so freely. He wants Malcolm's arms, the hollows of his elbows, the backs of his knees, his trim waist and the crease between his brows. 

The Bible condemns fornication, but what does it have to say about love? Was that ever part of the equation or did the men who made the laws assume that people like him aren't capable of it. 

⚓⚓⚓

“Do you think God’s out there?” Tom asks, holding John’s spyglass to his eye. He’s good at reading the ice. John expects that he’ll make ice master someday if Mr. Blanky has anything to say about it. He doesn’t know much about the ice himself, pedigree is preferable to practicality when choosing lieutenants. 

“You think we’re going to sail far enough that we’re going to find him?” John attempts teasing. He isn’t sure if they’re _ there _ in whatever they have. Whether teasing is okay or not.

“Isn’t that where you always find God? In the wilderness?” Sometimes Tom says things like this that set John’s brain on fire. That time he said religion, at its heart, is about being haunted he wanted so badly to cross the room and kiss him senseless (He told Tom this early on, felt the need to confess it like some shameful secret. Tom only laughed and said “you should’ve. Would’ve woken me up a hell of a lot sooner”).

“Yes, but you don’t need to search to find Him. He’s everywhere, in everything. God is the ice and the ocean. He’s not a book.”

“How do you wrangle the question of evil then? If God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good then why would He create evil? Why not let us stay in that damn garden? Why make the serpent?”

“Ah, theodicy.”

Tom puts the spyglass down and makes a face at this “_The Odyssey?_”

“No. Theodicy. It’s French and was Greek before that, meaning ‘justifying God’. It’s an old question, and I don’t have an answer for you. But I think we all have the capacity for good and evil, I think God made us that way as a test.”

“Do you think there’s God in me?”

“Yes.”

“And in yourself?”

He hesitates.

“I think there’s God in you. I think you’re closer to Him than the rest of us. And I think there’s God in us, together.” At this he presses the spyglass to John’s chest, letting his fingers sink into the wool of his coat.

Panic oozes down his spine as he whips his head toward the stern to see where the rest of their watch—a gaggle of ABs and Sgt. Tozer who, by virtue of his rank and fancy uniform, is deemed much more interesting than a lowly third lieutenant such as himself—are crowded around the stern, laughing uproariously at some yarn about a dockside doxy. They’re safe for now. Nobody can see them here. Except for God, of course. But they haven’t been struck down yet.

He closes fingers over Tom’s and smiles. 

⚓⚓⚓

When he's 19 he sees two men lashed for sodomy.

It isn't the first flogging he witnesses, and it won't be the last, but it's the one that sticks with him. One of the men is a mate with floppy red-gold hair and a smile that always reaches his eyes, amiable and well-respected. He was due for a promotion, at least that's what he heard. In the wake of his punishment, he's stripped of his rank. The other is an AB, all gangly limbs and worried brow, hands always in motion but his tongue half as verbose. 

Halfway through the mate's flogging, John's eyes roll back into his head and he drops like a stone before anyone notices. When he wakes, it's in a shadowed corner of the sickbay with a doctor looking over him. The doctor is somewhat sympathetic, says that it isn't uncommon for men to faint at the sight of a flogging, especially one for such grievous charges. It's all John can do to groan in warning before leaning over the side of the bunk and throwing up until his entire body hurts from the effort. How much time has passed is unclear. Could the lashed men still be here? behind a curtain where he can't see? Were they here while he was unconscious? 

Did anyone make the connection between him in the charges? He hopes it's just paranoia, that no rational mind would make the leaps and bounds his does. But still, he can't help but worry. 

The mate _ begged _ after five lashes for it to end. He wailed and writhed under the leather, trying to twist away from the sting though it only made it cut deeper. Blood poured freely down his back, almost too eager to spill, to show how the inside matched the outside. His cries were more animal than human, but the refrain of _ oh God please God oh Jesus make it stop _ rang of prayer.

Later, in his hammock, he hears the marines whispering. They’re supposed to be asleep, but everyone’s been shaken up by the discipline they’ve witnessed. 

One private, an ugly square-jawed man with beady eyes, says "pretty fucking stupid of him to risk it all. He could have made captain in enough time, now he'll be lucky if he's ever allowed on a ship again." 

"Why would you throw it all away for someone like _ that_?" his compatriot, with a thick Brummie accent and big hands, sneers

John thinks, absent-mindedly and half-delirious, that you must have to love someone a lot to risk something like that. But maybe that is stupidity in the end.

⚓⚓⚓

Letters have been accumulating on his desk since they left Greenland and with it their last chance for communication until they either find the passage or return home having failed. There’s a refuge in writing unsendable letters; unsendable both because of geographic implausibility and because of their content. At some point, they somewhat cease to be letters and transform into something more akin to diary entries. It’s almost like penance, writing things he can never say aloud.

The majority of the letters end up as ashes or otherwise defaced beyond legibility. It wouldn’t be safe for him if someone found out what he was writing. But some of them he keeps, the less incriminating ones, the ones he can’t bear to part with. Those letters end pressed between the pages of a volume of Burns he keeps under his bunk. 

To his mother, he writes that he’s sorry he can’t remember her as well as she deserves. He was so young when she passed, all his memories are hazy and refracted ten times over; perfect vignettes of her laughing face and soft hands. Always summer.

To his father he writes that he’s sorry he will never be able to measure up to his siblings. He’s sorry he won’t be well-matched in marriage, and he’s sorry if he was ever a burden. He tells his father that he tried, honestly. He's sorry that this is all he is, but he's got other brothers to be successful in all walks of life, he's got a sister whose marriage will secure the family an excellent legacy. Let him be happy, if otherwise unimportant. 

He writes Katie several letters about _ Terror _ and all her occupants, Crozier’s temperament, Neptune's pink tongue and wagging tail. Included are sketches of the ice and swell of polar waves against the bow. He sends his love to her and Lewie as always, writes ‘in recent months I have found myself to be much happier on a ship than I can previously recall. Perhaps the cold air is bringing on an unexpected change in my constitution’ and smiles at the half-truth. 

Letters are addressed to George Kingston of course. Talk of the books he reads and the discoveries they’ve made (mostly limited to plants and other living organisms, courtesy of _ Erebus’_ Mr. Goodsir who seems to delight in the natural world as though he made it himself and cannot believe the breadth of his creation). He enquires about Kingston’s university experience, though he knows he won’t get a response for years. It helps to imagine Kingston at home at some ancient library, pouring over texts with language that would make John’s head spin.

Mostly, he writes Malcolm labyrinths of words. Unintelligible sentences going on for paragraphs before he has a chance to breathe. The words pile up onto each other, his handwriting becoming more and more like a scrawl, he writes so fast it just pours out of him and when he wakes he finds he cannot remember what he put to page. In these letters he pens the words he’s wanted to say for so long, _ I love you, I love you, I love you._ It no longer feels like an admission of guilt. His hands come away from the letter-writing stained with ink, his shirtsleeves too, but it’s leagues better than blood. He and Malcolm have always belonged to different worlds, that their lives have overlapped enough to kindle such a lasting friendship is a blessing in itself. So, he writes everything he could never say to Malcolm’s face, writes until his hand cramps. Then, he crumples the letter up and throws it in the stove, watching flames lick at the corners until it’s nothing but ash.

One night, he stays up half the night penning a letter to John Hartnell of all people, a man he’s only cared about in death. He feels he owes the man something; after all, it’s his death that pushed him and Tom together which is a horrible thing, all things considered, but it’s true. Although it can’t do him much help now that he’s dead and buried, he tells John Hartnell that he’s sorry they cut him open like that, but that he was buried in comfort. Before finishing the letter, he promises to take care of Tom. It’s the least he can do. 

⚓⚓⚓

Hartnell traces a fingertip around the gold rim of his teacup. He's been doing this for the last ten minutes and John's point about Galatians has become increasingly nonsensical as he watches the orbit of Hartnell's pointer finger. "Do you think he remembered it, Lazarus?" Hartnell asks. It's an abrupt change in conversation, but luckily he's become used to abrupt changes. 

"Remembered what?" The speed at which the conversation is changed isn't what troubles him when he hears the name Lazarus fall from Hartnell's lips, it's the topic of conversation. He's spent half of his life feeling dead or playing at it. Ever since he met Malcolm, ever since he came to that horrible realization he's been dying by inches. He had to learn how to play it at, to bury his heart six feet below while the rest of him keeps walking as if he isn't missing something vital. The worst part is that nobody notices, he appears normal enough that it isn't questioned. 

"Being dead for four days. Do you think it was just like a long nap or do you think he felt his heart stop? Do you think he got the taste of death out of his mouth?"

John doesn't answer. He thinks about the time he's spent building cemeteries in his head, choosing his headstone, the flowers, the epitaph. 

**HERE LIES JOHN IRVING, **  
**1815-???  
** **PRODIGAL SON, ADEQUATE BROTHER, NOBODY'S LOVE**

He thinks back to John Hartnell’s grave on Beechey, not Torrington’s or Braine’s, because they were straightforward enough, but Hartnell’s, Hartnell’s was a mystery. Haggai 1:7: _ Thus saith the LORD of Hosts, consider your ways._

Haggai, one of the shortest books in the Bible and named for a minor prophet. Straightforward in intention but lacking in literary merit. It's a book only a man so earnest in his mission and so well-read of his scriptures as Sir John would pull an epitaph from. Haggai, a prophet whose plea for the Israelites to consider their priorities falls victim to self-doubt and preservation. They rebuild their houses before the Temple and are beset by hunger and bad weather as a result. When they worry it will not live up to the glory of the first, built King Solomon's expert hand, God relays the message through Haggai that the Second Temple will be even more exquisite even if they could not understand how. Triumph through suffering, prioritizing God above all else. It's a verse that Irving should find himself empathetic towards but cannot help but feel a sense of foreboding when he remembers it. 

He doesn't believe in bad omens, or in ghosts — he wasn't lying when he told that to Hartnell, though the phrasing he used, 'linger after death', was a fascinating choice — but there's something about those graves that feels off to him. Three healthy, young men dead less than a year into the expedition. Hartnell walking in on his brother's autopsy. The morbid epitaphs. He doesn't believe in ghosts but he _does believe_ the dead don't always stay dead, the way his mother and George sometimes reappear in his consciousness just as vibrant as when they were alive. Sometimes he feels the weight of their stares, even though he knows it's impossible. And sometimes he feels the weight of dozens of people watching him, all long-dead and obscure to him but they weigh down his shoulders nonetheless. 

Perhaps his own grave will read something like:

**WATCH YOUR STEP,**  
**T****HIS IS THE GRAVE OF KNOWN DEVIANT,  
** **JOHN IRVING**

Would his parents bury him if they knew? Give him a nondescript tomb in the family plot in hopes that everyone will forget. Or maybe just throw his body away like the damaged thing it is. Leave it for anatomy lessons. 

John circles back to Lazarus — alive and dead at once. Not quite whole, but whole enough for people to pretend. What must that have felt like, having one foot in the grave for the rest of his life? Both things and neither, too mortal for heaven but too death-touched for ordinary life. Displaced by this horrible and extraordinary experience. He feels like a wayfarer too, never content where he is, always worrying that he's seconds away from having to flee. Would his family disown him if they knew? As much as he wants to believe that wouldn't be the case, he knows it almost definitely would be. It's too ugly to be brushed off by a stint in a country hospital. It would eat them alive. He knows that their love is only conditional. Malcolm's too. If everybody found out, how quickly would they abandon him? He belongs but only barely, belongs but with a caveat. 

His father told him that his poor temper is among the reasons why he’ll be lucky to find himself wed. The same poor temper that he overheard remarks pointed at on _ Belvidera_, his temper and his pride, and his trouble making friends. All his life he’s been too much and not enough at the same time. A satisfactory sailor but unhappy in the Navy. An avid churchgoer without the makings of a clergyman. Enough of an outdoorsman to survive everything Australia thought to throw at him but lacking the business-savvy to make staying there worthwhile. One foot on a ship the other on solid ground, neither ever home. 

Maybe if he's lucky his tombstone will read: 

**JOHN IRVING,**  
**SON OF JOHN AND AGNES IRVING:  
****HE TRIED.**

"If it were me, if I'd been brought back from the dead, I'd be scared to sleep. I'd worry that I'd just close my eyes and slip away again." Hartnell continues, not caring about Irving's lack of a response. They're having two very different conversations. 

John considers Lazarus and wonders if _his _ mouth will ever be free of the taste of death he's become familiar with.

⚓⚓⚓ 

In his dreams, he’s talking to God, who looks quite a lot like a man (though not any man John has ever seen) and not at all as God should. They’re sitting on the steps to Heaven, St. Peter is nowhere to be found, the entire afterlife a ghost town. Everything is tranquil, perfectly still and blinding white. It is not an unfamiliar terrain for him. When he told Tom that God is in everything, even at the poles, even in them, he meant it. When he first laid eyes on the Arctic Sea he thought this was how the earth was always meant to be experienced, unspoiled by man. He even thought he’d be closer to God up here because there were so few living things, so little competition. 

Funny, he always thought God ought to look something like a father, not _ his _ father necessarily, but a father in the broader sense of the term. He _is_ a father, that’s why they pray the _ paternoster. _ But the God that sits beside him (for he _ is _ God, John knew Him instantly, the way he always hoped he would) could be mortal, could be any man on the ship only there’s strange electricity vibrating under his skin. Like a storm only just contained.

“I thought it’d feel wrong,” he admits. “For a while, I was hoping that the first time he kissed me I’d be absolutely repulsed and then it would be over. But it wasn’t. It felt right. It felt like something that was always meant to happen to me.”

God does not respond, but he does tilt his head the way his father always did when he wanted him to go on. 

So he does.

John Irving looks God dead in the eye and begins to speak. “You can tell me I’m going to hell for this but I don’t believe it can be any worse than my own mind. I’ve been there, I’ve done my penance, my time in the desert and this is who I am. I’ve always known this I just haven’t been able to say it. If I had to choose between happy but damned and miserable but holy I’d choose the former...no questions asked. You made everything, and I don’t know how evil can continue to exist in the face of omnibenevolence but that’s not what I’m trying to say. What I’m trying to say is that you made us in your image. You gave me this capacity for love. I was born for this. And I don’t think this self-loathing I’ve felt, this disgust, all these laws, I don’t think they’re your doing. I think they’re all human. God, my heart has been Gethsemane for so many years when it should have been Eden. That’s the one place I should be safe and I don’t even have that. Are you going to put my heart on trial? Will you weight it too? God, I swear it’s heavy because it’s full.”

In the end, God lets him go. St. Peter returns to his post. He does not see inside Heaven, does not hear praise from those enjoying salvation. But maybe he was never to be happy forever, maybe happiness on Earth is enough. John tells God what he is and the world doesn’t end, nothing changes but he feels changed nonetheless. 

Maybe love too is a kind of holiness

⚓⚓⚓

A day after David Young coughs up blood, he dies in _ Erebus _' sickbay begging not to be cut up like John Hartnell. Maybe he even dies in the same bed. 

The autopsy goes on anyway. On a purely theoretical level, he can understand why Sir John orders the autopsy. If one man has scurvy, then they're all at risk for it. John's not an idiot. He's been on enough ships to know that they need to be vigilant against disease, how quickly it spreads. That doesn't negate the guilt he feels over a dying man's last wishes being ignored. Maybe more than anyone else on the expedition he understands that the body is a sacred thing. He's spent days roaming galleries looking at depictions of Christ on the cross, the deposition of his body, the Virgin Mary clutching her son, the wounds in him. Nobody spends enough time inside his body like a tomb the way he does without appreciating the lengths to which the body goes to keep itself alive. 

When news of this reaches _ Terror_, Tom's knees go out from under him and Peglar catches him before he hits the deck completely. That’s what John hears, at least. He isn’t there when Tom falls, and can’t find a reason to leave his post until just before dinner when he begs off from the meal with the excuse of a searing migraine, and a reason to visit the sickbay. He’s come up with excuses for the other officers, and for Gibson, who will come to prepare him for bed, migraine or not, but has not thought of something to say to Dr. MacDonald.

“Lieutenant Irving, what brings you my way?” Dr. MacDonald asks and John is about to make up a minor ailment when he sees Tom sitting statue-still at the end of a bed. He’s glassy-eyed and neat almost to a fault, a faint chemical smell coming off of him and John wonders if he had to get the musk of vomit scrubbed off. He isn’t quite catatonic, which is a small mercy but a mercy nonetheless. When he locks eyes with John he opens his mouth like he wants to speak, then closes it just as quickly.

“Has he been like this long?” John asks when he finally finds his voice again. He wants nothing more than to cross the room and take Tom in his arms, instead, he stands awkwardly, their eyes meeting but not much else.

“He collapsed during his watch,” MacDonald confides, though there isn’t much need for confiding. Tom’s the only patient present, Dr. Peddie is nowhere to be found, there is no use keeping secrets on a ship which is built from whispers as much as wood. “He heard about-”

“About Young.”

“Yes.”

Tom was sitting at the table in front of Young when he first coughed up blood. He was having some sort of discussion about Neptune when it happened. Him and Golding, Evans, Strong, and Hickey, with Tom behind them catching every other word.

_ He was fine,_ Tom said later that night, pulling at a loose thread on one of his gloves, refusing to meet John's eyes. _He was healthy as the rest of us and then he wasn’t. He started coughing and then it just wouldn’t stop. It was this _ torrent _ of blood. It got everywhere. Evans and Golding were trying to hold him down and kept smearing it everywhere. All over his face and the table and themselves. _

Doctor MacDonald is still talking, but John’s not listening.

“I’m glad you’re here, I figured he might respond better to...a friend, as opposed to simply a superior.” If there’s a pause before the world friend, John doesn’t notice it. And if there’s a second connotation to the word _ friend _ he finds that he does not care much. 

Tom's half-focused eyes ghost over his as he reluctantly begins to lift himself off the bed but his legs are cramped from lack of motion, and, based on the fact that he appears to have vomited earlier, weak from lack of food. John just barely manages to catch him under the armpits before he tips over. 

With the help of Dr. MacDonald’s steady hand, Tom is righted, leaning heavily against John’s shoulder. The three of them stay in position for a few moments more - Tom half limp, John with his hands around his sides, careful not to touch him too much even now, Dr. MacDonald with a firm palm pressed into his back - a strange imitation Pietà. 

MacDonald looks at him over Tom’s shoulder and says in that kind, reassuring way of his “make sure he gets to bed safely”. There’s something in his eyes, a trick of the light, and something about the trust with which he all but bundles Tom into John’s arms, that makes his knees begin to wobble. _ He knows_. Dr. MacDonald _ knows _ somehow, by the familiar weight of his hands on Tom’s body, by Tom’s refusal to leave with anyone else, by all the things unsaid in the sickbay, _ I’m glad it was Young and not you _ most of all.

“Take care of him,” the good doctor says, with a fatherly pat on the shoulder before he begins to clean up his station.

John undresses him with infinite patience. He’s done the action dozens of ways in the preceding months—frantic and hungry, resulting in more buttons hitting the floor that he did not want to explain to Gibson; teasing and unhurried, taking in exposed skin by the eyeful; timid and shaking the first few times like he was touching a relic—enough to become as comfortable with Tom’s body as he is with his own, perhaps even more so. Tom sits and waits while John undoes his cuffs and pulls layers of wool away from his body, letting his own nightshirt fall over his shoulders. 

When they’re both bed-ready, Tom climbs onto his lap and buries his face against the soft skin of John’s neck, nearly biting down where neck becomes shoulder. What follows is almost a scream. Had it been any less muffled it would have echoed through _ Terror_. Tom screams, high in the back of his throat and so distinctly boyish that it makes John feel sick, before gasping, his entire body convulsing. The words that spill from his lips, trapped between skin and marred by hysteria, are hardly words at all but John understands them just the same.

_ He said he didn’t want to be cut open. _

_ I know. _

_ Just like John. He didn’t want to be treated the way John was. _

_ I know. _

_ And they did anyway. _

_ I know. _

_ I lied when I said John wasn’t haunting me. _

_ I know. _

_ He was. He is. _

_ I know _

John wants to say that he knew Tom was lying when he said he didn’t believe his brother was haunting him. He wants to say that he’s felt the same, still feels the same sometimes. Maybe they all have ghosts. Maybe people can’t live without leaving a scar, and maybe that’s what a ghost is: just scar tissue that never heals. If this were the time for words, he’d say that this is in no way Tom’s fault, none of this ever was. It was all a horrible accident that led to a stupid rumour, but words wouldn’t help now. He’s told Tom enough times that whatever ‘curse’ the men believed him to have would’ve worn off by now. He’s as much a Terror as the rest of them. A Terror and an Erebite, both and neither. Just like Lazarus. Just like John.

“I wish it had been me,” Tom whispers, voice thick with tears but dangerously clear. “I used to stay up all night wondering why it was him and not me. He deserved to go home. He _ deserves _ to go home still. It should have been me.”

It takes hours before Tom is calm enough to drift into a fitful sleep. John settles them both on their sides, noses nearly brushing, Tom’s breath against his cheek and Tom’s warm hands wrapped around him hard enough to bruise. This is the way he always wanted to lie with Malcolm. He’s past that now. Malcolm will always be his, the way first loves are, he’ll think of him softly but without the ache. Malcolm is his best friend, has been his best friend for half their lives, will, with any luck continue to be his best friend for the remainders of their lives. But Tom is here and now. He is alive and loves John the way Malcolm couldn’t, and he always considered this a defect. 

“‘M sorry,” Tom mumbles. “I didn’t mean to say that. I’ve stopped wishing I was dead.”

“I know,” John says once more, holds him tight to his chest and kisses his eyelids. There’s a creak somewhere deep inside him, a groan he feels in his marrow. Within his cavernous chest, a dam breaks and dozens of long-dormant fireflies come spilling out.

**Author's Note:**

> \- almost all of the biographical information comes from the memoirs published in 1881. they're available to read [here](https://books.google.ca/books?id=AEcBAAAAQAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s) and i recommend them, especially the letters  
\- john would have been a 19 year-old midshipman in 1834 while aboard the HMS edinburgh bound for the mediterranean. i have no idea whether there were any sodomy-specific floggings  
\- technically the uk doesn't have fireflies (the closest i could find was glow-worms) but fireflies sounded more poetic and less...larval  
\- john hartnell [jartnell] died on january 4, 1846. david young's date of death, according to the terror wiki is september 4, 1846 (spooky). The Lads probably start a relationship around april/june of 1856 imo  
\- a good third of this is lifted from this weird essay/poem i wrote in 2017 after i saw a production of _ bare: a pop opera _ and subsequently had a meltdown over being gay and raised catholic so uh. make of that what you will.  
\- i'm [@yourbatteredheart](https://yourbatteredheart.tumblr.com) on tumblr and [@kitnotmarlowe](https://twitter.com/kitnotmarlowe) on twitter


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